Teens Are Getting High On Flowers Nowadays

I was just starting to wrap my mind around the whole bath salts phenomenon, when I learned about “the growing and disturbing [drug] trend” amongst teens: FLOWERS. According to a CBS News report, a hallucinogenic high is achieved by smoking, snorting, eating or drinking the roots, leaves, seeds and flowers of any plant in the Datura family. These potentially deadly plants, which are in season in the summer, grow almost everywhere and are highly toxic. Says an anonymous teen about his Datura trip:

“It was just really, really intense, seeing people that weren’t there, talking to people that weren’t there. It was horrible and it lasted two days. The after affects were terrible. We got blurry vision. We actually thought we were going blind.”

So, this whole Datura high thing is not exactly new. Four years ago, Vice published an account of “carnival weirdness” while tripping on the flowers:

“The creatures were like humans, with limbs, a torso, and a face, but also demonic and malicious with sardonic smiles and soulless eyes. They were always staring at me, laughing and jumping out of the way — playing with me. Sometimes I’d look at a garbage bag and it would be a person. The creatures would occasionally hide behind a lamppost or even behind me. I’d turn around as fast as I could and I wouldn’t see them, but they’d always be there. I also kept encountering these prostitute creatures, super thin and really tall, like obscene drag-queens. They were lining up down the street, like lampposts.”

When all that fun is done, the anxiety, heart palpitations, paranoia and vomiting set in because the flower is actually poisonous. Just to remind us all, you can DIE from putting toxic shit in your body. And lots of people have.

To quote the Datura news expose: “Wild animals are smart enough to stay away from these plants, but human beings are not.” I think that’s the real takeaway here. At the very least, we should be able to out logic the animals. [CBS New York via Beta Beat]